Conservatism Three by Three

The vision of a Greater Separation of Powers is the idea that the great centers of power in modern society ought to be kept separate, and forbidden to combine with each other to dominate the others. That is what Michael Novak argues in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. There are three power sectors in modern society, political, economic, and moral/cultural, that have condensed out of the compact social order of pre-modern society. They are the basis of our freedom and our prosperity. But they are also dangerous and their powers need to be curbed. But how? The three powers need to be kept separate, just like the three branches of government, and prevented from combining to gang up on the other sector. Novak dug out the hidden goal towards which modern conservatism has been struggling towards since its emergence in the late 18th century in the revolt of Edmund Burke against the French Revolution and its rule of Reason. The great systematic powers of the modern world, the powers that have emancipated us from rural idiocy, but have also enslaved us with their dominations, the three power sectors of politics, economy, and moral culture: they must be kept separate.

We do not mean by conservatism, as the critics charge, an unreflecting tradition that follows without thought the “way” of the ancestors. Nor do we countenance it as a cynical defense of the ruling class and its privilege. Conservatism, ever since Burke, has been a self-conscious culture of tradition, that is, a culture that recognizes that, whatever we know, whatever we have learned, we still see through a glass darkly, and not face to face. We do not know what in our traditions is essential and what is dispensable. Conservatives only want to balance tradition, the unconscious accumulation of social expertise, the lifeworld of the taken-for-granted and the always already familiar, with an evolutionary process of consciously righting wrongs and adapting to changing times. Thus, a century before Freud “discovered” the unconscious, the First Conservative inaugurated a program that balanced conscious wisdom and unconscious “always already” instinct, founding human society upon the basis of the natural social bonds between man and man. And conservatives also experience themselves in a partnership between the past and the future: “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”2

In a profound way, Edmund Burke’s four great campaigns marked out for all of us already the program of modern conservatism. On America, he urged the folly of trying to rule that continent from Britain; on India, he championed the end of the ages-old warrior culture of imperial pillage and plunder with his ten year campaign to impeach Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal; on Ireland, he championed the emancipation of Catholics; on France, he drove the first stake in the ground against the hegemony of reason and system. In homage to Burke let us take his four campaigns and rewind them into three strands of conservatism and illuminate each one.

First of all there is cultural conservatism, which finds its founding statement in Burke’s declaration that we, the generation of the living, have a contract both with our dead ancestors and with generations yet unborn. Then there is so-called economic conservatism that begins with Adam Smith’s declaration of the Invisible Hand, that there is a natural instinct for cooperation between people that directs them into socially beneficial actions even when they are merely seeking their own self-interest. Then there is the political conservatism that begins with Montesquieu’s doctrine of the three branches of government and the separation of powers.

To identify these three strands of conservatism is to express the irony of its name and its program: for it is not really conservative at all. While cultural conservatism is certainly conservative it accepts that the past not fixed for all time, but merely a challenge to the living generation to honor its legacy and build a world that honors the sacrifices of the past. Economic conservatism is not really conservative all all, but a radical break with a past that took it for granted that all economic affairs required detailed top-down supervision to prevent a chaos of economic free-for-all, that the bosses needed to tell the workers what to do and when. Instead it recognizes that economic actions begin with the radical uncertainty of divining and serving other peoples’ needs. And political conservatism is nothing if not radical in its faith in distributed power. It honors the natural aristocracy of talent and wisdom while deprecating the oligarchy of power.

The cultural strand begins with Burke and his jeremiad against the mechanical culture of the Age of Reason, its reduction of everything to Newtonian mechanics and “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” and it continued in the 19th century with people like George Eliot, who argued for the dignity and the competence of ordinary people, from Adam Bede to Maggie Tulliver to Mary Garth and to Mirah Lapidoth. And that is to say nothing about the girl from rural Colorado, Thea Kronberg, in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Today, after the convulsions of 20th century totalitarianism, we have sadder, wiser leftists like Jürgen Habermas sidling towards a mitigation of the power of system, the domination of reason, by balancing it with the intersubjectivity, the reciprocity of the communicative lifeworld. We have Berger and Neuhaus arguing for the dignity of authentic self-governing mediating structures between the individual and the mega-structures of big government and big corporations. We have Lawrence Cahoone and his Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics working out the way in which ordinary people can live and cooperate in dignity, equality and freedom. And there is Charles Taylor, a liberal Canadian philosopher, who makes a liberal case for a society that refines the modern moral order of freedom, equality, dignity, and expressive creativity into a blend that balances ordinary flourishing with a yearning for a higher meaning. It is not just conservatives that have rebelled against the culture of the mechanical life. The Romantics rebelled famously against the sterility of reason; after them the Young Hegelians developed the notion of the alienation of modern life and their rebellion thrives today in the expressionism, existentialism, and environmentalism of early 21st century culture.

The economic strand that begins with Adam Smith and his Invisible Hand was expanded with Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage. Then in 1870 came the marginal revolution that resolved the apparent dichotomy between the idea of exchange value and intrinsic value. Then in 1920 Mises demonstrated the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism: without a market you cannot have prices, and without prices you cannot know the cost of anything. This, if anything, exploded the conceit of Marx that a market for labor represented an alienation of social labor. If by getting rid of capitalism you do not know what your labor is worth to others then how can you decide whether you are alienated or not? Finally Hayek showed the impossibility of bureaucratic centralism: the man in Washington cannot hope to out-think the millions of consumers and producers. The idea that only a wise ruler can negotiate the conflicts of a people is shown to be impossible. People do better negotiating with each other than through a political middle-man from the government; a Barnacle or a Stiltstocking knows only How Not to Do It.

If Adam Smith invented the Invisible Hand, Max Weber extended it with the notion of work as a calling, the Protestant Ethic that informed the spirit of capitalism; then he found that the whole urban western tradition had developed a culture that dissolved the age-old loyalty to kindred and legitimized the possibility of trusting strangers. In the western city, he argued, Christianity taught people to live as individuals and to extend trust beyond the boundaries of kindred towards anyone that could be trusted.3 The community of neighborhood, church, association and nation replaced the community of the kindred. You can see Weber’s theory confirmed in the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali girl born into the ageless culture of clan and tribe. From clan daughter in Somalia she became against all odds an educated individual in Holland and an activist for women’s rights as individuals.4 Then the Frankfurt School extended Heidegger’s concern about domination into a critique of instrumental reason that looked forward in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action to a move away from system and reason and towards conversation and negotiation of truth values as a basis of community. In the 21st century we have George Gilder reformulating the workings of capitalism in terms of the communications theory of Claude Shannon, that each economic innovation is an incident of surprise in a sea of noise.

The political strand that begins with Montesquieu’s idea of the three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, was implemented with astonishing success by James Madison in the US Constitution. It remains unequaled in its approach to the political problem: how do you give government enough power to fight enemies, foreign and domestic, yet not so much power that it can oppress its legitimate opponents? Yet its majority politics is critiqued by modern public choice theory. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock showed in The Calculus of Consent that the only just basis of legislation is unanimous consent, for it forces the majority to pay the costs of the minority in order to get its support. The control of government power requires constant vigilance, and the 20th century ruling class betrayed the vision of the founders with the notion of a “living constitution,” a construction that broadly licensed the ruling class, through its control of the judiciary and the culture, to amend the constitution without ratification by the people.

But now comes the task to combine the three strands into an integrated social philosophy, and that is where Michael Novak comes in. He extended the separation of powers doctrine from Montesquieu’s rule about government to a philosophy about society as a whole, thus binding together the three strands of modern conservatism into a single rope. Differentiating society into three sectors, economic, political, and moral/cultural, he proposes what we have called here a Greater Separation of Powers. In this view the separation of church and state, specified in the First Amendment prohibition of an establishment of religion, is extended to the notion of a separation of powers between each of the three sectors: not just separation of church and state — the separation of political and moral/cultural power — but separation of economic and political power and separation of economic and moral/cultural power. Thus politics, economy, and culture are free to develop within their own sectors without subjection to the domination of a totalitarian combination of powers.

In Status Anxiety Alain de Botton rehearses the great moral stories that have been told about status, about rich and poor. Do the rich deserve to be rich, or are they crooks? Are the poor deservedly so, or are they held down by the evil rich? Let us rehearse here the stories about the government and the people that tell us the moral framework of modern conservatism.

First Story:

Government is force and force destroys society; you must limit government if you desire to reduce force and exploitation.

How do you limit force so that people are “forced” to solve their problems without force? You limit government with the political conservatism of Montesquieu and the founders. You hive government away from a corrupt condominium with the economic sector and the temptations of crony capitalism; you keep government away from leaking into the moral-cultural sector following the temptation of an established religion to force its moral vision upon others.

Second Story:

Politics is division and turns people against each other; you must limit political power if you want people to stop fighting each other and start cooperating.

Cultural conservatism teaches that it is religion and culture that teach cooperation and mutual assistance. Modern totalitarian secular religions, on the contrary, start with a declaration of irreconcilable differences that can only be resolved by force. Marxism must start with the notion that the workers are exploited and that nothing short of political revolution can fix it. Modern progressivism must start with the notion that certain groups are permanently marginalized and that they must fight the rest of society to get their rights. Unfortunately, their tactics confirm their faith in force. If you mobilize to fight a holy war against the bosses, chances are the bosses will organize to fight right back; if you organize the marginalized to fight for their rights against the racists, sexists and homophobes, you force racists, sexists, and homophobes to push back. Modern secular religions that campaign for a collapse of the separation between the sector of force and the sector of meaning must end up by creating a totalitarianism that enforces meaning with government coercion. Cultural conservatism teaches people to think first about what they can contribute to society and do something about it before they ask what society owes them.

Third Story:

System is domination and sets the powerful over the powerless; you must limit system to give the powerless a defense against power.

The authoritarian delusion implemented in the welfare state is that ordinary people just don’t have the information, the knowledge to manage their own health care, to educate their own children, to buy safe and reliable products. Economic conservatism shows that they are wrong. The unconscious organism of the price “system” automatically selects desirable health plans that most people like; it automatically prefers schools that most people want to send their children to; it penalizes producers that sell defective products. This does not require that each individual possess encyclopedic information about all options; it merely demonstrates that the collective impact of millions of individual decisions based on partial knowledge adds up to a wealth of knowledge that a corps of policy analysts in Washington DC can never approach.

A world illuminated by this triple conservative vision is one where people can live independent and free under institutions that will protect freedom while encouraging social cooperation and punishing freeloading. With cultural conservatism the bonds of tribal loyalty are sundered and people are socialized within moral/cultural associations such as churches and mutual-benefit associations. With economic conservatism people are freed from the cramped limitations of the family economy and economically socialized to work that benefits the stranger. In political conservatism people are socialized for and protected by a state with powers limited to the essential tasks for which force is required.

Now all we need is the implementation. And that starts, after the horror of Obama, with persuading the American people to abandon the welfare state’s Battle of the Benefits, the reduction of social life to a political scramble for entitlement loot, and in that act of renunciation transform America from its current shame as a robber band of Takers into a land that is first of all a society of Makers.

But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.
Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Societya complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churchesbuilds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.Francis Fukuyama, Trust

We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.
E. G. West, Education and the State

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of agesthey seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

When we received Christ, Phil added, all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority  the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says we should....Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism